


Ashes and Aftershocks

by fire_bolero (tria_star)



Category: Rockman X | Mega Man X
Genre: M/M, robots in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-23
Updated: 2014-06-23
Packaged: 2018-02-05 21:06:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1832290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tria_star/pseuds/fire_bolero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zero's reflections as he returns home with X in the immediate aftermath of X6. Originally posted on LiveJournal in 2007.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ashes and Aftershocks

Even limping and scuffed from battle, X still managed to captivate me. I couldn’t tear my gaze away from his face, glowing with victory, those green eyes of his bright and snapping. He leaned heavily on my arm as we made our way down the hallway from the command center, but I knew it was because he wanted to, not because he needed the help.

So brave and beautiful X had become since the day we met, sharpened by the hells Sigma had put him through over and over again. Behind his eyes existed a hardness born of survival instinct and deepened by decades of war. If I could have gone back and erased all the suffering he had endured, I would have. I had spent my whole long life, even given up my life, trying to make his ordeals easier for him to bear, listening to a deep-rooted hunch that told me he was the center of my existence. As much as that was true, though, there really was no greater joy for me than fighting alongside this, the most powerful being on earth, watching him grow stronger the more we struggled. 

X caught me staring, blushed, and there was that smile of his – the one I’ve never seen him give anyone else. His smile was the earliest memory I could recall, waking up on Dr. Cain’s lab table a lifetime ago. I smiled faintly in return, remembering. Had he really changed so much since then? It was hard to imagine the soft-spoken rookie I had known with the ferocity he had shown when we fought each other during the Eurasia crisis. 

My jaw tightened at the thought. Our falling-out still gnawed at me, enough to chill the elation I had felt at finding him again, but not nearly enough to stop the pull I still felt towards him. 

Distant laughter floated down the corridor towards us. In all corners of the base, hunters were celebrating Sigma’s latest defeat in their own ways. Morning held the promise of hard work, as everyone would be expected to help fix the damage the combined efforts of Gate and Sigma had caused. Night, however, belonged to the victors, and the air itself felt charged with their excitement.

X nudged us toward an alcove in the wall, one of the many window seats that lined the pedway between the command and residential wings of the base. Framed by the cityglow shining through the glass behind him, he sat down with a sigh. I remained standing and folded my arms over my chest to still my hands. I felt strangely possessed, watching X’s chest rise and fall as he drew a deep, shuddering breath. Something passed before his eyes, and he squeezed them shut for a moment. 

“I missed you,” he said at last, opening his eyes again to look up at me. 

I straightened at those words and exhaled softly. 

“There’s something I wanted to tell you,” he added.

“I’m listening,” I said, thickly. He was sending out strange signals, much as he had been when we first reunited. It was doing the most maddening things imaginable to my tactile sensors . . .

X brushed the back of his hand over his lower lip, not breaking eye contact. “Come here, first,” he whispered. 

His couldn’t have been any more persuasive had he held his buster arm to my head. 

I grabbed him by the shoulders, lowered myself onto his lap, and kissed him. Hard.

X responded with fire, reaching up between our bodies and around to grasp the back of my neck as I drank him in. I quickly grew mesmerized by his sweet metallic taste, so alien and yet so achingly familiar that my throat grew tight, because it was  _X_  and there had always been X . . . kissing him was as close to the feeling of coming home as I had ever felt. 

Sparks danced across our lips as we crushed against each other, X’s soft panting driving me insane. My fingers slid up under his helmet and buried themselves in his hair, while his hands moved, dreamlike, over every part of me that he could reach, as if he was trying to convince himself that I was really there. Our tongues met, timidly at first, then with increasing desperation. It seemed like nothing short of molecular fusion would satisfy the mindless longing I felt. Data as subliminal and raw as the moans escaping our lips was darting between X’s body and mine. To my amazement, or his, or both of ours – it was becoming hard to tell, the way our systems were beginning to synch – X’s consciousness seemed to stretch out before me like a matrix. I pressed harder, sensing his memories, moments of quiet pride, of admiration, of a secret longing -- 

Suddenly I flinched, struck by a powerful feeling of despair. X had thrown down his defenses and now all of the thought patterns he buried the deepest – all of his blinding emotions! – were pouring into my mind. I felt like my core was being ripped from my chest; I was drowning, screaming soundlessly into a void – I was overwhelmed by X’s ability to  _feel_. 

I broke the connection with a cry and slumped against him. He held me, kept me from sinking to the floor as our breaths rang out in the darkness.

“X,” I gasped into the crook of his neck, “what  _was_  that-- ?” I shivered as I spoke, remnants of his sorrow still aching inside.

X tilted my chin up so I could look into his face. His eyes were wide but unafraid.

“You’ve felt something like this before, too,” he said.

I exhaled slowly, remembering. “Yeah.” 

“For who?”

“The little flower,” I murmured, my mind reverting in its grief back to the nickname I had given her. The guilt was still too strong for me to voice her name out loud.

“Iris,” he whispered. “Why did it hurt so much to lose her?”

“ . . . because I loved her, X.”

“Zero . . .”

He stared at me intently, placed a hand on my burning cheek and curled his fingers into the strands of my hair that had spilled over my shoulder. 

I stared back, not quite comprehending what he was trying to say, but letting our exchange trickle its way through my thoughts. Beautiful little flower. I had turned my own weapon against her, insane with fear for what she had become. It began to dawn on me – the strange symmetry of circumstances. X had been afraid for me, afraid to see me turn into what we dreaded the most. Hadn’t we both at some point told each other that it was better to be dead than to be maverick? 

One realization bled into another. The outpouring of despair in X’s memories . . . had he really been mourning for . . ?

Hardly able to breathe, I kissed him, felt the connection form again, and reached out with my thoughts.

_I . . . I love you too._  

He rested his cheek against my shoulder as if suddenly shy – after everything we’d been through together – and looped his arms around my waist. I held him soundlessly, breathing in his scent and loving him, until some forgotten hour of the night.

 


End file.
